ISTE

Lot of energy and excitement.

Partnerships

I'm at the ISTE conference in San Diego - attending the affiliate assembly which is a get together of all the state and regional groups that are affiliate members of the larger organization. A panel discussion is talking about the value of partnerships for organizations such as ours. In so many ways, this has to be at the core of what we do as school librarians. We need to partner with obvious people like teachers and administrators and students to help all them learn. But we especially need to find ways to partner with others beyond our normal allies to work together for mutual benefit.

Special interest

At the MSBO (Michigan Association of School Business Officials) conference, where I just presented a session on ipad apps for administrators. I just spent some time wandering through the exhibits where I saw all kinds of vendors : accountants, architects, heating and cooling folks, food service people, sports field and flooring people. There are some many different people involved in the business of running schools. It's a good reminder that we librarians are just one part of the big picture: one special interest among many. One of the big things we need to do as school librarians is make sure that we are aware of all these others folks involved in running a school.

We need to be aware of how we connect with them, how we can help them and how they can help us, and make sure that we communicate and collaborate with them! We also really need to be aware of how they see us: If they see us as just one of many special interests clamoring for attention and money, that colors the way to work with us. Until we can learn to work with them and speak their lingo , they will continue to see us as some special interest group separate from them with our own jargon. We need always to find ways to connect and collaborate and move to " we" discussions of our common needs and interests. We need to help them see us as part of the group, part of the team, part of the solution. Too often we lose sight of that when we're fighting for our jobs, and sometimes it can be very hard to do.

I've got no magic answers -  Just saying we need to do it.

iBooks

Sitting in the mobile learning conference, listening to a great session in using the iPad in elementary language arts. http://usingipadsintheclassroom.weebly.com/  Among other things they are showing how they take advantage of some of the capabilities of iBooks.  Very good stuff! They are showing some of the new features related to textbooks within iBooks as well.

A few thoughts that come to mind:

1. What does it say about our profession that more people attend this mobile learning conference than attended our state school librarians conference? I like think that it's primarily because so many of us school librarians have had our positions eliminated and that schools don't value school librarianship enough to release or pay for conference attendance.
2. During their session they showed the way iBooks automatically links to Wikipedia.  When they did so, one of the attendees , a fellow librarian, said "Boo, Hiss!"  What does it say about our profession that we resist change ? I understand that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and not the greatest or only reference tool, but it is a useful tool, and we need to embrace all tools and ways to access information.
3. ebooks are already radically changing our role as librarians, just as online databases have for our periodicals, and the internet has for our reference materials.  We need to grapple with these changes, try to understand them, and help our students and teachers make good choices.

First Visit

Just recently returned from our first visit to the American School of Bombay. I am quite impressed with this vision that the school has.  ASB is a one-to-one school that strives to be both student oriented and innovative.  They are the only school I have yet seen that has a Research and Development team!
They also take staff development seriously.
We spent three learning not only about the school, but also about the philosophy and techniques for teaching in one-to-one environment. In addition to working on those concepts and skills, We had the opportunity to visit classrooms in action twice, one day at the elementary level and the next day at the secondary level.  I was impressed with not only the quality of the teachers, but also how well the students took responsibility for their own learning.  It was great to be able to sit down with students, inquire about what they were working on, and get good responses that indicated the student had a clear understanding of what they were working on.

At MAME Spring Leadership conference with some good thoughts about gaming in education from Dr Barry Fishman : Why Schools Should Get serious About Play. I really appreciated his point that schools should be more game-like  - learning environments

Dr. Liz Kolb - @lkolb - http://cellphonesinlearning.blogspot.com/
Sharing some great resources.

Here's her handout:
http://www.slideshare.net/elizkeren/liz-kolb-mame

The thing I like about these sessions today is that people are starting to think about how to use these devices that kids (and teachers) are bringing to school with them in productive ways.

creating ebooks

Here's a nice overview of creating and publishing your own ebooks

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